I’m not a “camera fanatic”. I’m not interested in making movies that puts the camerawork in focus and the rest outside. I’m not Paul Greengrass (the new inventor of the “shaky handheld” camera in films such as the Bourne installment) and I’m certainly not Stanley Kubrick (the man that invented the use of long lenses in modern cinema with epics such as “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining”).

What I like about movies is what they tell us and in what way they are telling us. I am a more on the Coen brothers side when it comes to storytelling. Let the simplest thing do all the heavy work so that the story can surface… slowly. That’s storytelling when storytelling at it’s greatest!

In other words; I like movie making because it get you to tell other people your view of the world. As I said in an earlier post, the stories has been the center of my fascination of moviemaking since I was 12 years old. I have written about 30-40 different Synopsis during these alomst 11 years, some of them I actually have managed to have write it down and some don’t.

But the camera is still the ultimate tool to bring the story you are figuring out into a visual meaning. This is when you write on a piece of paper up to the point you’re shooting it and later, editing the whole thing together. When the camera comes in, that’s were the two different mediums collide and what was a text based medium becomes a visual, a far more intriguing medium.

During this day I have been “knee-deep” in After Effects again. This time  I am trying to get a footage look like a Hollywood movie, which is not easy if you don’t have the tools of the trade of course. I like to experiment a lot with colors and noise. It’s funny, and I consider it to be an art form of such. What I do is using a known thechnique of color reduction which is better known as “Bleach Bypass”. Basically you’re setting the saturation (also known as color intensity) in the middle, all the way out the left is full color and all the way to the right makes the video black & white. When you have set it in the middle, add a little touch of a color. What color is decided on what mood you want the scene to be in.

For instance, The Matrix movies uses alot of green. Wich is a natural color used to bring out the futuristic clean look of our world. Green is also a color that makes the picture more crisp, because it enhances all the natural in our surroundings, such as Grass for example.

In a movie like the Coen Brothers “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” it’s colorsetting has been set on a yellowish look. Just because it’s set in the outskirts of the southern in USA, and yellow is a prominent color over there (with the meadows and the fields in mind). Yellow does also the trick by making the picture warm and enhancing the “oldie” of the film. Does it changes the mood? Well in a way it does. Of course it has to do a lot with how you’re shooting it but the color does much to the pase of the movies, it feels more relaxed, sort of speak.

In the television world this is demonstrated through a lot of series. Most prominently CBS Crime Scene Investigation. They are using colors to add the tone of each series. Green for CSI: Las Vegas, Yellow for CSI: Miami and blue for CSI: New York. Coincidence? No… Blue is a normal color in New York and the police department standard color is blue there. Also, blue is not a natural color per say, it’s more mechanic than organic so the mix makes the series justice in that field. Yellow, I presume is added a lot in Miami to show of the warm climate and adding a lot more tension to what is happening. Green in Las Vegas is probably because the color green mixes wonderfully with dark scenes and in Las Vegas there is a lot of those. The night shift is sort of enhanced by the fact that they are using green and green is as I sad with Matrix a mysterious color that adds a crisp and cold tone.

Then of course, the different color setting is to create a profile for each series so that they are more easier to tell apart, which is one and so forth.

After Effects is funny to work with color because the creating is truly limitless. I can range from every spectrum of millions of colors I have at my disposal and I like it!

More AE to come next week, as the production of my “news report” starts! See you then!

During a period of almost three weeks now (wow! Has it gone that long?!) I have being knee-deep in After Effects and Avid, making a very special Music Video. It’s not the Music Video you would come to think of, no… It’s more of a “visual aid” in the background for a band performing in Globen this Friday. The work I’ve put on this visual aid-video is probably the most extensive I have ever done.

The song, per say is a form of cover of David Bowie’s famous space ballad “Space Oddity” from 1969. The first thought that raced through my head when I got the project was basically: “Wow, 2001!” Stanley Kubrick, one of my absolute favorite directors of all time directed this Epic in 1968. Based upon Arthur Clarke’s novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey” had one very special moment that for me is equal to the closest thing you can come a “visual orgasm” on screen… The “Slit Scan Sequence”.

Created and crafted by special effects mogul Douglas Trumbull, this very sequence is probably the most psyched and most outrageous thing I ever did see. Being that I am a fan of Stanley Kubrick since many years past and that I adore all creative things cinema has given us during its over 100 years of existence, I saw the moment of opportunity and decided to create it as an inspiration for my music video. Now, making this very sequence was harder than I thought it could be… It even got to the point where I thought I would never see my precious homemade “Slit scan Sequence”. Stubborn as I am with my work, I did not give up.

The plug-ins I used for this sequence is mostly Walker Effects own “Stargate” filter for After Effects. The first render I did, rendering it to a QuickTime movie took about 6 hours to complete and it was 25 seconds long. “What do I do now?” I thought quietly for myself. Well, I decided another method involving lesser use of color filters and motion blurs, I even shorted the segments from 25 seconds to 10 seconds, give or take. Suddenly the rendering time went down from 6 hours to 45 minutes. After sitting with a slow working After Effects for a weekend you start to think for yourself: “My god, am I greedy or what?” Why didn’t I just steal the whole clip from the movie and inserted it to the video? Because I am me and creating new things is what I love most. It’s more rewarding when you do something totally alone and see it finished rather than just steal the clip and be done within a day. I like making films this way; it’s what I do…

And here we are, three weeks later and I think I can actually see the horizon slowly emerging in the very cloudy home of mine. All though not quite finished yet, I would easily say that I am probably 97% done, being that this thing needs to come up on the screen and so forth. But that’s not my problem… Not at least that I know of.

In this visual movie there is also a rendition of Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang, the reason for this is because the song lyrically is about Fuglesang but the melody is still Space Oddity… Ever heard Weird Al? Okay, then that should be enough explaining. And be able to move a person into space you need to key him out of and area, with a green screen into the movie, take the green stuff out and then move space or whatever background you feel is necessary and then you have it there. With this project he was going to take an EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) or just simply put “a spacewalk”. This was not that hard to accomplish since I already have AVID with its supreme Chroma Key-tool “Spectra Matte” and Cycore FX (Keylight) for After Effects it was pretty easy to take him out of the green sort of speak and besides, we shot him in HDV with a Sony HDV-camera making the footage clear and crisp. You could actually see the sweat from Fuglesang forehead sometimes.

Now of with the next projects!

Footnote: The famous Slit Scan Sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” can be viewed here